Posted on 02/14/2006 5:38:46 AM PST by SJackson
What are the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furor? I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications. Signs of disengagement are all around. · Trade: Boycotts now exist in both directions. Even as the U.S. government sanctions Iranian products, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his government will “revise and cancel economic contracts” with countries where newspapers published the cartoons. Several Muslim countries have suspended trade with Denmark, while Muslim-owned stores in Canada have removed Danish products. The Pakistani medical association even announced a boycott of medicines from five European countries. · Consumer items: Muslims are increasingly replacing Western consumer items with their own. They purchase the extremely modest Fulla and Razanne dolls rather than the busty Barbie. In France, Beurger King provides halal food, competing with Burger King, just as Mecca Cola takes the place of Coke and Pepsi. Al-Jazeera is starting an English-language channel to go up against CNN and the BBC. · Financial investments: As a result of freezes on funds and the designation of terrorist entities, Muslims have moved large amounts of capital out of the West and invested these either in their own countries or in other places around the world, such as East Asia. Middle Eastern oil exporters before 9/11 annually put as much as US$25 billion into American investments; since then, the amount is about US$1 billion a year. · Emigration: 9/11 caused a significant increase in obstacles to Muslims traveling to the West, so fewer Muslim business executives, students, hospital patients, conference goers, and workers are reaching there. · Tourism: Islamist atrocities such as the murder of 60 Japanese, German, and Swiss tourists in Luxor in 1997 or the abduction of 32 German and other travelers in the Sahara in 2003 had already led some Westerners to avoid discretionary travel in the Muslim world. Cartoon-related violence has prompted a Danish advisory warning citizens against travel to fourteen Muslim countries. Scandinavian tourist companies have cancelled many tours to North Africa. · Foreign aid: Muslim aggression against aid workers in Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority have led to the partial or complete withdrawal of European missions. In Chechnya, the Danish aid mission was expelled and the Iraqi transport ministry has rejected any future offers of Danish reconstruction money. · Embassies: From the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1978 to the multiple attacks on Danish and other European embassies this month, the assault on Western diplomatic missions in Muslim countries is causing them to take on the features of armed fortresses, to be removed from the center of towns to the peripheries, and in some cases to be closed down. · Westerners providing services: Zayed University in Dubai fired an American professor, Claudi Keepoz, for distributing the Muhammad cartoons to her students. Rampaging Palestinians caused the foreign observers staffing the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, or TIPH, to flee Hebron. These developments suggest what the prime minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has called a “huge chasm” between the Muslim world and the West. Or, in the more bellicose wording of the influential Sunni imam Youssef al-Qaradawi, “We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us.” Should the chasm widen, with its concomitant lessening of human interaction, commercial relations, and diplomatic engagement, the Muslim world will likely fall further behind than it already has. As I wrote in 2000, “Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom – whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity, or literacy.” Disengagement will only worsen the Muslim predicament. Reduced contact with the world’s most modern, powerful, and advanced countries would likely cause Muslims to do even worse in those indices and lapse deeper into a condition characterized by self-pity, jealousy, resentment, anger, and aggression. Especially when contrasted with Muslim successes in premodern times, these traumatic circumstances help explain the crisis in identity that often causes Muslims to seek solace in radical Islam. For everyone’s sake, it is important that Muslims begin more successfully to negotiate their path to modernity, not to isolation.
I guess the Iranians won't be so eager to trade in Euros now that the rest of their cronies hate Europe so much.
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"Signs of disengagement are all around..."It's about time.This is a hole Muslims are digging for themselves.The riots over the cartoons are just highlighting the inescabale fact that Islam and western civilization are incompatable.I believe the ME needs us(the West)a lot more than we need them.
Sounds good to me..the fewer muslims, the fewer lunatics to blow us up while we have dinner at NorthPark.
As for all the rest..their manufacturing, radio and t.v. et al will only last as long as the first blown op-amp. If they quit trading with the West, electronic components will be hard for them to get, and all the electronic controls, sensors, and equipment will be useless.
Then they can resume their natural condition:.....
living from day to day, terrorized by lunatic mullas and imams, and living in 6th century dirt.
Ummm, were Islam and Christianity ever compatable? nly dredful implications are on the side whos religion is most intolerant and psycopathic. Wonder which side that is.
Whatever this guy is smoking is affecting his brain.
Oil is the only thing the Middle East has that the Western World really needs, and that can be found in other countries. Take away the oil and all they have left is sand and a fanatical religion that keeps them ignorant.
You mean it may prove hard to grow food in sand irrigated with oil?
I guess those ME'ers will show us.
"It may prove hard to grow food in sand irrigated with oil?"Good point:)BTW,ever thought about what will happen to countries like SA when they run out of oil?Back to 3rd world status?
A long piece to say what we already knew: Muslims want to live as if this were still the 7th century.
This is some kind of "make believe game" that pins the entire current conflict on the nation states of the Middle East.
That just has never been the case.
Russia,China, Germany, France and other countries are deeply involved in all of this...against us.
Perhaps that's why Pipes' usual cogent conclusions seem to ring hollow here. It just will never end up with the Islamic world retreating into the 6th or 7th century.
Nuclear weapons change the dynamics dramatically.
Isolation just is not a logical outcome after they, use nuclear devices to put the US "off the air" for several years causing economic and social collapse the likes of which are almost inconcievable to contemplate.
This is a "WAR" now on their nuclear-supplemented ability to cripple the West without massive military confrontation...since they don't have our military might,they'll just nuke western powers into powerlessness and proceed with the takeovers and mass executions.
They've already announced that this is their plan.
And it's being aided annd abetted by our own MSM and the leading party of Hatred,the Democrats.
The only other puzzel piece here is the fact that this conflict is already underway and most of us seem to think that it's years away or that it will never happen.
Daniel Pipes! Why are you letting us down?
The Pakistani medical association even announced a boycott of medicines from five European countries.
Gee, if that decision happens to kill their fellow pakistani citizens..please increase the boycott for an additional 10 years. Please!
No need for that...
They forgot to list the point that many people sitting on the fence regarding how to deal with these fanatics are now calling for them to be destroyed.
We seemed to grow into the greatest Nation on Earth BEFORE we started depending on so much oil.
It's just a tool.
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